Got any spare guitar pick-ups that you don't know what to do with?

Well here is an idea from Yuri Landman builder of experimental electric musical instruments from his site Hypercustom it is called the ''Quick Steps Kalimba''.

all pictures from hypercustom.com

He states that: The Quick Steps Kalimba is a Bass Kalimba starting with the low E of a Bass guitar going up to D# and covering the complete octave. Traditional Kalimba’s are often tuned different. Most of them close to a regular major scale (Do-Re-Mi). That set up is very handy to play harmonic, but it excludes you from making chord progressions, which is one of the key elements of Western music. Therefore those African instruments are often not very suitable to play on during complete songs made by a guitar/piano. My Quick Steps covers all twelve notes of the Western scale. This makes it slightly more difficult to play the correct notes, but you can play almost any pop song on this one.

If you prefer the African tuning it is possible to rearrange the prongs in the traditional configuration.

Boys keep swinging with the "Home Swinger"

Yuri is based in Holland and holds workshops on how to build this and other fascinating instruments which include among others a ''Caterpillar drum guitar'', "Moodswinger" and the intriguingly named ''Home Swinger'' (careful if you Google that one!). He says of the workshops that ''Participating on the workshop requires no special skills or handiness. It’s as difficult as building a piece of IKEA furniture''. If you can't make the workshops you could always get your Strat pimped into ''The Shavelander'' by Yuri